Character encodings can be confusing for every developer, providing pitfalls even for the most experienced ones, so a lot of the time we want to end up with something that “just works” without an in-depth understanding of the involved concepts. In this talk, Anna will give an overview over what they are, what the JavaScript language provides to interact with them, and how to avoid the most common mistakes in Node.js and the Web.

Node.js is famously a JavaScript runtime that encourages using asynchronous operations wherever possible – but what happens when you really, really need to do synchronous I/O? Anna gives an overview over the – surprisingly many – different ways to achieve this, and what we can learn about how the language and Node.js internals work from them.